White Stains : The Literary Remains of George Archibald Bishop, A Neuropath of the Second Empire. by [CROWLEY, ALEISTER] ANONYMOUS

Amsterdam: Leonard Smithers, 1898. Small 4to, pp. 131. Printed on Van Gelder handmade paper. Uncut in original cream wrappers. Upper wrapper detached, large 'W' to upper wrapper, wrappers sunned, extremities rubbed, light scattered foxing to margins. Housed in a custom-made clamshell box. First edition. 100 copies. This copy out of series and in original wrappers. Perhaps a unique proof copy of the rarest and certainly the most outspokenly erotic of all 1890s decadent verse. The total print run consisted of one hundred numbered copies, bound in black cloth with white lettering. THIS IS THE ONLY KNOWN COPY IN WRAPPERS, and that it is unnumbered suggests that it may be a trial copy run off by the Amsterdam printers, probably Roeloffzen-Hubner & Van Santen, for Leonard Smithers, the clandestine London publisher acting for Crowley. White Stains is ascribed by its anonymous 'editor' to George Archibald Bishop, named for Tom Bond Bishop, Crowley's pious Plymouth Brother uncle and guardian. Crowley once said of Bishop that 'no more cruel fanatic, no meaner villain, ever walked the earth.' Of White Stains, Crowley wrote that it is 'commonly quoted by my admirers as evidence of my addiction to every kind of unmentionable vice. Asses! It is, indeed, technically an obscene book, and yet the fact that I wrote it proves the purity of my heart and mind in the most extraordinary fashion.' Timothy d'Arch Smith tells us that, according to George Raffalovich, joint editor of Crowley's periodical The Equinox [1909-1919], the poem in this collection called With Dog and Dame is not by Crowley, but is a translation of a French poem whose author is unknown. The rarest issue of one of Crowley's rarer titles. Fabulous.